In traditional medical education, learners are mostly trained to diagnose and treat patients through supervised practice. Artificial Intelligence and simulation techniques can complement such an educational practice. In this paper, we present GLARE-Edu, an innovative system in which AI knowledge-based methodologies and simulation are exploited to train learners “how to act” on patients based on the evidence-based best practices provided by clinical practice guidelines. GLARE-Edu is being developed by a multi-disciplinary team involving physicians and AI experts, within the AI-LEAP (LEArning Personalization of AI and with AI) Italian project. GLARE-Edu is domain-independent: it supports the acquisition of clinical guidelines and case studies in a computer format. Based on acquired guidelines (and case studies), it provides a series of educational facilities: (i) navigation, to navigate the structured representation of the guidelines provided by GLARE-Edu, (ii) automated simulation, to show learners how a guideline would suggest to act, step-by-step, on a specific case, and (iii) (self)verification, asking learners how they would treat a case, and comparing step-by-step the learner’s proposal with the suggestions of the proper guideline. In this paper, we describe GLARE-Edu architecture and general features, and we demonstrate our approach through a concrete application to the melanoma guideline and we propose a preliminary evaluation.
7 July 2016 in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Now-related temporal data play an important role in many applications. Clifford et al.'s approach is a milestone to model the semantics of `now' in temporal relational databases. Several relational representation models for now-related data have been presented; however, the semantics of such representations has not been explicitly studied. Additionally, the definition of a relational algebra to query now-related data is an open problem. We propose the first integrated approach that provides both a neat semantics for now-related data and a compact 1NF representation (data model and relational algebra) for them. Additionally, our approach also extends current approaches to consider (i) domains where it is not always possible to know when changes in the world are recorded in the database and (ii) now-related data with a bound on their persistency in the future. To do so, we explicitly model the notion of temporal indeterminacy in the future for now-related data. The properties of our approach are also analyzed both from a theoretical (semantic correctness and reducibility of the algebra) and from an experimental point of view. Experiments show that, despite the fact that our approach is a major extension to current temporal relational approaches, no significant overhead is added to deal with `now'.
31 October 2013 in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine